The archive is the place for the storage of documents and records. With the emergence of the modern state, it became the storehouse for the material from which national memories were constructed. Archives also housed the proliferation of files and case histories as populations were subjected to disciplinary power and surveillance. Behind all scholarly research stands the archive. The ultimate plausibility of a piece of research depends on the grounds, the sources, from which the account is extracted and compiled. An (...) expanding and unstable globalizing archive presents particular problems for classifying and legitimating knowledge. Increasingly the boundaries between the archive and everyday life become blurred through digital recording and storage technologies. Not only does the volume of recordable archive material increase dramatically (e.g. the Internet), but the volume of material seen worthy of archiving increases too, as the criteria of what can, or should be, archived expands. Life increasingly becomes lived in the shadow of the archive. (shrink)

The literature on the life and work of American psychiatrist Harry Stack Sullivan is used to provide a critique of Jacques Derrida’s Archive Fever. Derrida’s concept of archival violence relies on psychoanalysis both for its epistemology and for its exemplar of archival violence. The Sullivan literature shows how these positions become antagonistic when Derrida’s work is used to think about Freud’s critics. The published literature on Sullivan is described as a queer archive that has been strongly shaped by historical shifts (...) in discourses about homosexuality, but that continues to stimulate and frustrate attempts to know the essential truth about Sullivan. Sullivan scholars have been quick to read his personality theory as autobiography, belittling the importance of friendship in Sullivan’s developmental theory, which differentiates it from the heteronormative Oedipal narrative. It is argued that Derrida’s mode of critique would entrench rather than unearth such heteronormative historiographical moves. Scholars are invited to put Sullivan’s biographies and published works to a broader range of uses in the human sciences. (shrink)